PPC marketers are always optimizing — some monitoring here, an adjustment there, and then you start to see (better) results. When you have that much to do, it’s impossible to do it manually and scale your output.
So there’s no reason to fear automation — like scripts. They not only speed up the process, but also allow you to be much more efficient in running your business. That’s right — scripts can drive business impact.
Best of all, anyone can use scripts, even if you haven’t written even a single line of code in your life!
So this week on episode 18 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to our panelists who live and breathe scripts:
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights to help you grow your business by automating your PPC accounts with scripts.
1. Update price extensions
Nils: Price extensions are very popular extensions that you can use in your Google Ads accounts to display actual prices. But prices tend to change quite often. If you have different products, and the product manager or account manager is changing the prices of the products because of inventory or competition, you need to update the price extensions with the actual prices.
Up until a year ago, it was impossible to update them through scripts. Fortunately, now we can access the price extensions via the scripts API to keep them in sync with your inventory.
To check the price extensions, you need to do the following: Google Ads scripts → References → AdsApp → Ad Extensions → Prices.
2. When to turn to scripts
Steve: ‘This is taking too much manual work’ is the point where we begin to think about building scripts to shorten the whole process. Most of the time, it’s brought up due to some amount of laziness on our part. For example, I’m currently working on Search Query reports and rely on scripts to deliver automated reports to me.
One of the best things about scripts is that you get to see this functionality and dozens of ways one can apply that across campaigns. The fun of scripts is finding something and imagining creative ways to apply them.
3. The business value of scripts
Nils: Scripts deliver great benefits all over the place. I’ve created a list of the Top 7 benefits of using scripts. Personally I try to automate as much as possible by using scripts. It has helped my remote PPC agency succeed and apply consistent processes to operations. With scripts, you can come up with new ideas to test your account, which wouldn’t have been possible manually. For example, we know that N-gram analysis is very tedious and time-taking. But with scripts, something that complex becomes quicker and can be done more frequently.
The biggest benefit of scripts for my agency has been quality assurance. As the scripts are monitoring everything, any mistake done by my team comes under notice quickly. This way I can be alerted when anything goes haywire and sleep easy.
Steve: We recently shifted to a new revenue model — cost per deliverable, where we charge our customers a fixed amount for our services. Scripts allow me to do that a lot more efficiently.
It’s not a discussion of hours anymore. Our clients are more focused on whether the product runs efficiently rather than how. This allows me to take my expertise and focus on deliverables rather than time.
4. Copy-pasting and modifying scripts
Steve: I think in blocks, which is basically the JavaScript way of thinking. Figuring out which functions do what, and letting them flow through until you get all the pieces for the script. In a lot of cases, you will get pre-built scripts to work on.
For example, Google’s Account Anomaly script is very easy to adjust to things that you are looking for in your anomalies. This can be a good base to get started with scripts.
5. Using scripts to monitor Google’s AI
Nils: We know that Google AI uses machine learning to predict performances on clicks. And machine learnings involves a ‘learning phase’. We are basically providing Google money and data to feed it to the machine learning algorithms. This is where I love to use scripts to track how AI is handling my accounts. If it goes haywire, and does a bad job for my clients my scripts would alert me immediately.
For example, for close variants, I have created a script to monitor the performance of the real keyword against the close variant. If there’s a significant difference in the performance, like in CPA or ROAS, I get alerted of that. You need to layer scripts and Google’s AI to make the most of it.
Conclusion
It’s important to look at Google Ads holistically. Everything — bids, budgets, ad text — influences this interconnected system. It’s not enough to set a script and forget it; you have to monitor it periodically as well.
As you gain experience, you can try modifying them to suit your specific needs. Experiment with existing rules to see how they affect the performance of your PPC accounts, and remember to preview your script before applying it.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. So experiment away!
